I get it, White People: you like yourself your white artists. And there ain't much whiter than Bob Dylan, fuck no. He's a fancy kind of Wonder Bread, I give you that, but he's still Wonder Bread, spread thick with clever White People Peanut Butter words, but his bread still ain't got no JAM, dig me…?

I can't expect pale-ass Norwegians to realize the greater importance of a Black Artist, but -- fuck, people -- James Brown is the MAN. James said more in an "Unhhh!" than an album worth of Chrome Horses and Siamese Cats, you feel me…?

I got soul and I'm super badHaI love, I love to do my thingHa and I, and I don't need, no one elseSometimes I feels so nice, good godI jump back, I wanna kiss myself

Any Black Brother will tell you THAT'S the shit, but you White People don't get it because it's funky, too. The Funk confuses the White Man, makes him afraid of feeling instead of thinking. And that's what you White People do: think White People things, over and over, while Never Getting On The Good Foot.

So enjoy your Bob Dylan and his Sack of Clever White Rhyme: me and the Brothers are gonna be kicking' it to "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"…

Love poetry. Have never read Adunis/Adonis but the article reference to the Syrian poet made me curious about him. I would have awarded it to him just based on the Wiki article.

Adonis’s publications include twenty volumes of poetry and thirteen of criticism. His dozen books of translation to Arabic include the poetry of Saint-John Perse and Yves Bonnefoy, and the first complete Arabic translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2002). His multi-volume anthology of Arabic poetry (Dīwān ash-shi‘r al-‘arabī), covering almost two millennia of verse, has been in print since its publication in 1964.

Islamic authorities and scholars have issued death threats against Adonis for his criticism of Islam and have called for his books to be burned. In spite of this opposition, Adonis is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature,[3][4] Adonis has been described as the greatest living poet of the Arab world.[5]

If you look at the stuff that is getting printed as poetry now, for example the crap in the New Yorker, that I feel I should be getting something like $100/hr to read somebody's therapy session, for example, then we can look at this as a shot across the bow of 'poets' today, and the shit, and I am not using the word "shit" in a figurative sense either, the shit they are writing. They are killing poetry. Like Iowahawk says, they have killed Poetry, gutted it, skinned it, and now wear it as a suit and demand its former respect.

In comparison, Dylan is Wordsworth, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and yes, Dylan Thomas, all rolled into one.

Having a day to think about this, I think it is great. A conservative choice, a blow for old school literature.

"So let’s dispel with this fiction that the betting odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature actually mean anything. They don’t, with the exception..."

This sounds as misguided as the belief that a Muslim sounding name of a potential terrorist perp doesn't mean anything, when if people in fact declaim that the name "doesn't mean anything" or you "can't tell anything" they are giving meaning and telling us what the name means to them, namely they have to warn other folks not to give meaning or try and tell of your thoughts or prayers to anyone about it. Keep silent until authorities inform you of what to say or forever be marked with a B for Bigot.

It is like the saying "nothing to see here."

How many times is that sentiment offered when in fact there is something to see, something people might even find interesting enough to stop and look at?

Compare this to how many people say "nothing to see here" because, like the State of Nebraska except for where Begley lives, there ain't much to see there. I doubt Cornhuskers spend their days walking around telling people "nothing to see here" even when true.

Betting odds for the Nobel tell me there is a much higher chance that big money can influence the final decision vs. if there were no odds because no money was gambled, or at least gambled with the formal structure of the odds in place.

I'm not sure the Nobel Prizes carry quite the prestige they once had, and I say that as one who is partly of Swedish ancestry and whose Grandfather once worked for Nobel. Clearly the Peace Prize is now the subject of ridicule after Obama's award (The Norwegians are to blame for that.) Some of the Literature Prize winners have been exposed as frauds. Even Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath which won on the basis of its "realism," is now seen as a false fable. Very few of the "Okies" who came to California came to pick fruit. Mostly, they were salesmen, shopkeepers, auto mechanics, drill press operators and so on. They drove to California in 3-5 days, not 6 months. They bought modest tract homes in South Gate, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Hawthorne, and Inglewood. They bought their cars from Cal Worthington. Of course, all that ruins the peasants and proletariat narrative.

But in saying all that, I don't mean to diminish the choice of Bob Dylan. He was a talented lyricist and a great success. As I look down the list of the New Republic's "odds maker," The names listed in the New Republic article were not any more compelling than Dylan. Many less so.

I really would like to know how they decided on Bob Dylan. Why did they change their ideas on what is meant by "literature"? He is influential - how many people know a lot of his songs as compared to how many know any poem written by anybody since 1950? And he changed a the way popular music was done - changed it several times. But since when do the Norwegians care about that? How could you be considering that dreary list of writers year after year and then suddenly vote for Bob Dylan? Still if the committee is made of people 70 years old they could have listened to Dylan when they were twenty. Maybe they just reached a critical mass.